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Building Navigability into Web Pages Your wonderful web site full of resources for students will not be used unless it is obvious how to move from place to place. Students who become lost trying to navigate through a web site are not likely to learn much.
If students can picture the structure of your course in their heads, they always know where they are and how to move to other parts of the course. There are several ways to help students create mental images. 1. Create a graphic that shows all pages as small page icons and shows how pages branched and are linked to each other. 2. Use an analogy for organizing pages. Creating a Table of Contents such as is found in a book can help. Use links in place of page numbers. The major sections in the Table of Contents correspond to chapters and should be of equal value or weight. 3. Use an image map on your home page. Image maps can contain graphics that simulate buttons with labels. Some image maps contain graphics that help a student visualize the content they will find when they click. For example, clicking a graphic of an envelope is likely to suggest that students will find an email tool in that location. Choose graphics that are unambiguous and not misleading.
1. If you must use a long page of HTML, put links at the bottom and at sections throughout the page that return students to the top. It is frustrating and time wasting to scroll from the bottom to the top of a long page. 2. Place a return link at the bottom of each page returning students to the page from which the current page was linked. If a page is linked from multiple pages, for example, a common set of directions for using a conferencing system, then direct students to use their browser Back button to return to the linking page. In addition to a link that returns a student to the page from which the current page was linked, you should consider placing links to Table of Contents, the Help page or other frequently used pages. 3. For web pages that are part of a sequence of pages, having navigation links that take the reader from one page to the next insures that they will access the pages in the order you intended. Pressing the Back or Forward button on the browser merely takes the reader to the last page read, which may not be the page that you wish the reader to read.
1. If you use graphics as links, be consistent in their use. If you use a red arrow to go back and a green arrow to go forward, then always use red and green arrows for the same navigation. If suddenly presented with blue and yellow arrows, you can imagine that students would think that there is significance to the color change. Using the same graphics repeatedly in a web site can save downloading time since browsers cache graphics. They only need to be downloaded once. 2. Label your navigational links, even if you use graphics. For example, don't label a link Back, but Back to Introduction to Writing a Paragraph. 3. Place your navigation aids in the same location on every page. Don't have a Back button at the top on some pages and the bottom on others.
Use more than one form of navigation. If you use graphical buttons, use text links as well. If you have a fancy graphic image map, have a text navigation button bar at the bottom or top. Not everyone uses the web in the same way. Build for as many different kinds of users as possible.
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Help
your students create a mental image of your web site.
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